On a Saturday morning in Short Hills, the parking lot at Congregation B’nai Israel fills before nine, and the families who walk in past Herbert Ferber’s burst of welded bronze are doing something their grandparents did a few miles east, in a Newark that no longer exists. The Jews in Short Hills did not arrive here by accident. They followed a railroad, a fortune in shade rollers, and a postwar instinct that the good life lay west of the city. What they built, in one of the wealthiest square miles in America, is a community that wears its prosperity quietly and keeps its memory close.
The Place
Short Hills is not a town. It is an unincorporated community inside Millburn Township, in Essex County, tucked against the first wooded rise of the Watchung reservation about twenty miles from Manhattan. Trains on the old Delaware, Lackawanna and Western line still stop at its depot, as they have since 1880.
The numbers are extraordinary. The median household income sits at roughly a quarter of a million dollars, and Time magazine in 2014 simply called it the richest town in America. Around 88 per cent of adults hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, and the schools that draw families here rank among the best in New Jersey.
It is, in other words, exactly the sort of place a striving generation dreams about. For thousands of Jewish families across the second half of the twentieth century, that dream had a specific address.
How It Became Jewish
To understand the Jews in Short Hills, you have to start with a soap manufacturer’s son and a city that was once a third Jewish.
Hartshorn’s ideal village
In 1877 Stewart Hartshorn, who had made a fortune perfecting the self-acting window-shade roller, bought roughly 1,550 acres of farmland and forest in Millburn Township. He wanted to build an ideal village, a planned commuter suburb, the first of its kind in America.
Hartshorn laid out winding roads to follow the land rather than fight it, preserved the trees, and persuaded the railroad to stop its trains at a depot he built himself. He sold lots only to buyers he approved. For its first decades, the village he made was a genteel Protestant enclave, and Jews were not among the people Hartshorn had in mind.
The Newark that fed it
The Jewish story arrived from the east. Newark by the 1930s held at least 70,000 Jews, and its Weequahic section was the densest Jewish neighbourhood in the state, a world of delicatessens, shuls, and a high school whose graduating class in 1958 was around four-fifths Jewish.
After the Second World War, that world began to empty. As Jewish families grew more prosperous and the city changed around them, they moved out along the rail and road lines into the nearer suburbs: Irvington, Hillside, Maplewood, the Oranges, and, for those who could afford the climb, Millburn and Short Hills. The migration was steady and generational, parents pushing their children one rung higher than the rung they had reached.
Building the institutions
The remarkable thing is that the anchor was already waiting. Congregation B’nai Israel had organised in Millburn in 1924, and in 1946 it hired a rabbi whose biography carried the weight of the century. Max Gruenewald had led the Haupt Synagogue in Mannheim, Germany, until it was destroyed on Kristallnacht in 1938. He served B’nai Israel until 1970 while also directing the Leo Baeck Institute.
Under Gruenewald the congregation commissioned what architectural historians call the first truly modern synagogue. The architect Percival Goodman completed the building in 1951, and onto its walls he brought the leading abstract artists of the day: a Torah ark curtain by Adolph Gottlieb, a mural by Robert Motherwell, an exterior sculpture by Herbert Ferber. In 1950 two stones from the ruined Mannheim synagogue were set into the new sanctuary, so that what had been smashed in Germany was literally built into the walls of suburban New Jersey.
The Reform community grew alongside it. Temple B’nai Jeshurun, founded in Newark in 1848 by Central European families and long one of the foremost Reform congregations in the country, followed its members westward and settled into its present building on South Orange Avenue in 1968. Today it counts well over 1,200 member families. Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel, another Reform congregation rooted in the old Newark and Oranges Jewish world, serves Short Hills families from nearby South Orange.
Then, in the 1990s, came the third tradition. In 1995 a Short Hills resident approached Rabbi Mendel and Chana Devora Solomon, then living in Morristown, and asked for help leading Shabbat services. Chabad at Short Hills grew from two family homes into a congregation that, after more than two decades, opened a 28,000-square-foot centre on South Orange Avenue, the Murray and Lucy Pantirer Family Building, named for Holocaust survivors.
The Landmarks
Congregation B’nai Israel, 160 Millburn Avenue, Millburn. The Conservative congregation founded in 1924, housed in Percival Goodman’s 1951 modernist landmark. The Gottlieb ark curtain, Motherwell mural, and Ferber sculpture make it as much a work of art as a house of worship, and the embedded Mannheim stones make it a memorial.
Temple B’nai Jeshurun, 1025 South Orange Avenue, Short Hills. A Reform congregation whose roots reach back to 1848 in Newark and whose present home dates to 1968. With more than 1,200 families it is one of the larger Reform communities in the region, the spiritual centre of gravity for much of liberal Jewish Short Hills.
Chabad at Short Hills, 650 South Orange Avenue, Short Hills. The Pantirer Family Building, on the corner of White Oak Ridge Road, occupies the site of a former landmark diner. Its sanctuary, classrooms, kitchens, and Judaica shop sit beside an outdoor plaza with a memorial to victims of the Holocaust and to fallen Israeli soldiers.
Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel, 432 Scotland Road, South Orange. A Reform congregation serving Short Hills and Millburn families from just over the border, the product of mergers among historic Newark-area temples and a reminder that the community spills naturally across town lines.
Millburn High School, 462 Millburn Avenue, Millburn. Not a Jewish institution, but central to the story all the same. Consistently ranked first in Essex County and among the top dozen high schools in New Jersey, its reputation is precisely what drew, and keeps drawing, education-minded Jewish families to Short Hills.
The Mall at Short Hills, 1200 Morris Turnpike, Short Hills. Built on land Prudential assembled in 1949, opened as an open-air centre in 1961, and enclosed by the Taubman Company in 1980, it is now a luxury retail destination of Hermes and Chanel. It is the secular town square, where the whole community, Jewish and otherwise, has crossed paths for sixty years.
Where They Came From
The Jews of Short Hills are overwhelmingly the descendants of Central and Eastern European immigrants who landed first in Newark. Some families trace to the German Jews who founded B’nai Jeshurun in 1848; far more descend from the great wave of Russian, Polish, and Lithuanian Jews who packed Weequahic and the Third Ward in the early twentieth century.
The move to Short Hills was a domestic migration, not a transatlantic one. It was measured in miles, not oceans, but it carried the same logic that had carried earlier generations across Europe and the Atlantic: a relentless push toward safety, schooling, and a better street for the children.
That arc, from the immigrant city to the manicured suburb, is one of the most familiar in American Jewish life. It echoes the move to Scarsdale in Westchester, the build-out of Jewish Teaneck across the Hudson, and, a generation later and a thousand miles south, the retirement-era flowering of Boca Raton. The starting point, more often than not, was a dense urban core like the one chronicled in the Lower East Side or Borough Park, Brooklyn.
Short Hills Today
Short Hills today is quieter, in its Jewishness, than Borough Park or even Teaneck. There is no eruv-bound walking village, no main street of kosher storefronts. The community is largely Conservative and Reform, professional, and comfortable, expressed through synagogue membership, day-school carpools, and bar and bat mitzvah seasons rather than through visible street life.
It is also changing. The same forces that drew Jewish families up the rail line now draw a large and growing Asian American population, and the census records Short Hills as roughly two-fifths Asian. The synagogues remain busy, the Hebrew schools enrolled, and Chabad’s new building suggests confidence rather than retreat, but the community shares its streets and its top-ranked schools with newer arrivals chasing the same dream.
What endures is the memory of the journey. The stones from Mannheim are still in the wall. The grandchildren of Weequahic still daven a few miles from where their grandparents did, in a town their grandparents could only have imagined reaching. Short Hills is the destination at the far end of a very long road, and the Jews who live here have not forgotten where the road began.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a large Jewish community in Short Hills, New Jersey?
Yes. The Jews in Short Hills and surrounding Millburn make up a substantial and long-established community, served by Conservative, Reform, and Chabad congregations. Millburn Township as a whole has historically counted thousands of Jewish residents.
Why did Jewish families move to Short Hills?
Most came as part of the postwar migration out of Newark, especially the heavily Jewish Weequahic section. Families followed the rail and road lines into Essex County suburbs like Short Hills, drawn by space, safety, and the excellent Millburn schools.
What is the oldest synagogue in the Short Hills area?
Congregation B’nai Israel in Millburn organised in 1924, and its Percival Goodman building was completed in 1951. Temple B’nai Jeshurun is older as a congregation, founded in Newark in 1848, but it did not settle in Short Hills until 1968.
What makes Congregation B’nai Israel architecturally important?
Completed in 1951, it is often called the first truly modern synagogue. It features commissioned works by abstract artists Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, and Herbert Ferber, and two stones from a Mannheim synagogue destroyed on Kristallnacht in 1938 are set into its sanctuary walls.
Are the Jews in Short Hills mostly Orthodox?
No. The Jews in Short Hills are predominantly Conservative and Reform, reflected in the prominence of Congregation B’nai Israel and Temple B’nai Jeshurun. Chabad at Short Hills serves Orthodox and outreach needs, but the community is largely non-Orthodox.
What is Short Hills best known for besides its community?
Short Hills is famous for its wealth, named the richest town in America by Time in 2014, and for the upscale Mall at Short Hills. It is also known for the top-ranked Millburn High School, one of the best public schools in New Jersey.
If your family’s story passed through Short Hills, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the shuls of Newark’s Weequahic to a pew beneath the Mannheim stones in Short Hills, to wherever you are now.